Attack the messenger, thats always a good way to start a fallacious arguement. At least Wiki sources their articles, so if you have anything specific in the content you'd like rebut, then just say.
Some say thats why FDR went to war.
Yes, Obama did inherit a $10.626 trillion debt, two wars and a Wall Street mess from his predessor and the $800 billion stimulus is about all that Obama has spent during his entire presidency and is lower than Bush, Clinton, and Reagan's spending combined. It was that stimulus spending that kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.
You need to pay more attention. I said the Hoover dam helped to "build" the economy in the Southwest, which it did.
Hoover was a free market Republican and just like Reagan, he lowered taxes on the rich before he raised them and the Smoot Hartley Act was a major contributor to the cause of the GD. That was Laizzez Fair that did that, not Keynesian and nothing you can say is going to revise that history.
Im not attacking the messenger, I got nothing against you... I'm attacking a falty source used for your argument... Wikipedia is an amazing new style of technology, but it is not without its major faults... It tends to be a good quick reference source of encyclopedic knowledge (dates and facts), but the articles are not written by experts on the topics, theyre written by anyone who choses to contribute... and the analysis within articles is opinionated, and thus not valid...
To prove it, here's what the very article you posted says...
"Although Hoover is regularly criticized for his laissez-faire approach to the Depression,[78] in his memoirs, Hoover claims that he rejected Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's suggested "leave-it-alone" approach,[79] and called many business leaders to Washington to urge them not to lay off workers or cut wages.[80]
Lee Ohanian, from UCLA takes a controversial stance, arguing that Hoover adopted pro-labor policies after the 1929 stock market crash that "accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression".[81] This argument is at odds with the more commonly accepted Keynesian view of the causes of the Depression, and has been challenged as revisionist by many economists including Brad DeLong of U.C. Berkeley.[82]"
So there you have it. The person writing the article espouses the Keynesian principles, exposes their bias, and thus is not an objective opinion on the topic. Furthermore, he even credits several things Hoover did to tinker with the economy... That's not laissez-faire... you know that... right?
Hoover made many attempts to tinker with the economy, because there was a major stock market crash midway through the first year of his term in office... I won't question what Hoover's overall philosophy regarding the economy is... but during his presidency, the simple fact of the matter is, he tried whatever he could to jumpstart the economy... He raised taxes, he raised tariffs, he created the mexican repatriation act to take mexican immigrants out of the workforce, he attempted the Hoover Moratorium, he created the NCC and then later replaced the NCC with the RFC, he inacted the Federal Home Loan Act, and alterned numerous domestic services, such as prisons, mail carrying, and proposed numerous other increased funding to things like the department of education...
To say he was Laissez-Faire is just ignorant to the facts of the matter, and just buys into the partial reasoning of the Keynesians who just label and blame him as a scapegoat...
You mentioned building the economy in the southwest, in a discussion regarding the recovery from the great depression... The great depression was not recovered from because a couple thousand people got jobs in the southwest working on the hoover dam... Millions were out of work, and it wasnt until the populations were able to get back to work where they were that the economy got going again...
Still closer to the point... the things Hoover did which held down the recovery process are very similar in nature to the things that Obama has been tinkering with to attempt to start this economy... From taxing the rich, taxing corporations, etc.
If the $800B is all that Obama spent, you'd have to explain why Bush's last and highest budget submittal was for $2.7T in spending, and yet Obama put forth budget proposals of $3.6T, $3.8T, $3.7T, and $3.8T without spending... could it be because whent he house changed his, his spending plans got limited? As it wouldve worked by his budget proposals, that's $4.1T advanced spending compared with Bush's highest budget, not even counting the 400B he put onto the last Bush budget to raise it to $3.1T... ARRA, Omnibus Appropriations Spending Bill, Cash For Clunkers, ACA, extending Cobra benefits, extending unemployment benefits, etc.
Getting back to the real point of this discussion, economics is not a real science... its a series of theories, none of which could ever achieve the status of proof... Keynesians want to claim a big win as if they cured the depression (which I already mentioned was also facilitated ultimately by war preparations)... Keynesians are doing everything to hype up Obama's Keynesian approach to recovery as being successful, too... but the numbers just don't show it... The best they can attempt to demonstrate is that the Keynesian approach slowed the fall... Since we have yet to fully recover, and once the government funds ran out, the programs they attemted to jumpstart are still stalled... Again we have a situation where we can't know which solution would've been better since Obama just used the 1 approach...
Can't wait until Romney wins this election, so we can get to see another...
